Channel Four tapes show Coulson pressurising hacker-journalists, Select Committee told hacking ‘was endemic’ at News of the World
Rupert Murdoch….tired and depressed
After a week of relative calm as the Egyptian unrest pushed most other things off the front page, Newscorp and Andy Coulson are back under deep suspicion this morning.
Channel Four has obtained audio tapes (played during its Dispatches programme last night) in which, during 2007, Coulson praises phone-hacker Ian Edmondson as “a great operator”, and on another occasion is clearly heard pressurising another journalist, saying “I need more exclusives and they need to be self-generated”. The tapes don’t prove a knowledge of hacking, but the idea, again, that a top, detail-obsessed editor didn’t know how the stories were being obtained is ridiculous.
The recordings suggest an atmosphere of high-pressure-do-what-it-takes being both created and condoned by Coulson. This is firmly supported by separate evidence given to a Commons Select Committee by former F1 racing boss Max Mosley yesterday. He named the NoW’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, as “an executive who organised endemic phone hacking” at the paper. This now gets even sillier: Coulson’s enforcer on the paper was organising widespread phone taps, and Coulson didn’t know?
Mosley told MPs that Thurlbeck, who is still employed by the paper, “commissioned potentially illegal investigations” by Mulcaire. Perhaps he won’t be working there for much longer, because Max went further in his Parliamentary evidence:
“Even a cursory examination of these papers will have identified a number of NoW journalists who had commissioned potentially illegal investigations by Mulcaire. There appears to be endemic criminality on a significant scale within the News Group organisation.”
Not only there, it seems: the original privacy invasion report of 2006 suggested strongly that the whole of Fleet Street was at it – especially the Daily Mail.
As The Slog predicted ten days ago, just like Watergate, the net is cast ever wider and higher until, very probably, everyone involved will become entangled in it. If Thurlbeck knew, it is inconceivable that Coulson didn’t. If he knew, Rebekah Wade must have known. She is a Murdoch favourite – so did James know? Did his Dad?
These are the questions which must be answered in due course:
* Why didn’t Ed Miliband ask a PMQ about the affair earlier?
* If the top policeman in charge Andy Hayman saw the evidence about Thurlbeck – and if he didn’t, then that was a dereliction of duty – why didn’t he prosecute?
*Was Newscorp in general and Coulson in particular protected by the political Establishment to keep Murdoch sweet? (Remember – in 2006, Roop was still supporting Blair).
* If senior Newscorp staff knew of the practice, did this or the previous Government know? Was there cooperation between the press and government?
* Why didn’t the CPS broaden the investigation to include other newspapers given the privacy evidence in the public domain after the 2006 prosecution?
* Is the current former Daily Mail news management now running the Barclay Brothers’ Telegraph titles implicated?
*When will it dawn on the Government that Murdoch’s empire is about the worst possible news group to be allowed to take up a potentially dominant role in the UK TV market?
There are obviously some very nasty things in Pandora’s box. Ever so slowly, the lid is being prised off. We may well be about to see payback time for years of illegal abuse by tabloid journalists. The nation will not mourn.
The Slog 